Papers
11
Total Citations
837
H-Index
8
About
William T. Lowrance is a prominent urologic oncologist whose research has fundamentally shaped our understanding of surgical treatment patterns and comparative effectiveness in prostate and bladder cancer care. His work sits at the intersection of surgical outcomes research, health policy, and evidence-based medicine, with a particular focus on evaluating the rapid adoption of robotic-assisted surgery in urologic oncology. Lowrance's most influential contribution — a 2012 analysis of American Board of Urology certification logs (278 citations) — provided the first large-scale, nationally representative picture of how robotic prostatectomy was displacing open surgery across the United States. Complementing this, his 2008 examination of open radical cystectomy perioperative outcomes (218 citations) established a rigorous contemporary benchmark against which minimally invasive alternatives could be meaningfully compared. His research consistently challenged the assumption that technological innovation automatically translates into superior patient outcomes, demonstrating through population-based analyses that open and robotic prostatectomy yield broadly similar postoperative results while carrying substantially different cost profiles. Beyond clinical outcomes, Lowrance notably examined the ethics and accuracy of direct-to-consumer internet marketing of robotic surgery, highlighting information quality concerns that have important implications for informed patient consent. Collectively, his body of work has been instrumental in grounding the robotic surgery debate in rigorous evidence rather than marketing-driven enthusiasm.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Contemporary Open Radical Cystectomy: Analysis of Perioperative Outcomes218 citations · 2008
- 3Costs of Radical Prostatectomy for Prostate Cancer: A Systematic Review112 citations · 2012
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- 6Evidence-Based Comparison of Robotic and Open Radical Prostatectomy34 citations · 2010
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- 8The rapid uptake of robotic prostatectomy and its collateral effects12 citations · 2011
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